The Problem

A well known high street chain needed constant new pricing tickets which took ten weeks to be designed, proofed, printed and delivered into stores. This made price setting extremely difficult, as the company was unable to react quickly when competitors launched new ranges or changed prices.

In some instances multiple sets of tickets were produced upfront due to the length of time required in production, the most appropriate set was despatched at the last possible moment to match the current trading conditions. The problem with this was that each store received the same set of tickets regardless of whether they stocked the item; therefore it was a costly way of trying to ensure that correct prices were in shop windows at key trading times.

The Solution

4DM designed a bespoke web portal to supply their stores with price tickets within a shorter time frame. The chain operates two distinct brands, with over seven hundred stores and in two different countries. New price labels are generated every week to cover new product launches, items going on sale, price increases along with any changes to respond to competitor offers.

The company needed a more flexible way to produce these labels and a new system was required that would reduce the time of delivery and cost of production.

4DM worked closely with this client to develop a bespoke web portal that not only reduces the time for label delivery, now down to less than ten days, but only produces the labels required for each store.

So how does it work?

Each week the client decides which items need to have a new price label produced. They will advise the supply chain of these changes and including the colours to be used on the tickets. Then, the supply chain personnel extract data from the companies systems into Excel spreadsheets and by manipulating these spreadsheets, different ticket styles and colours can be created.

The spreadsheet is then loaded onto the web portal and the portal will create a set of PDF proofs and e-mail them to the user. This process takes less than five minutes and the PDF contains a ticket for each item. Upon inspection of the proofs the user can approve them or remove the items from the portal, this allows them to create as many sets of proofs as required in order to get them correct.

Once a set of proofs have been approved the user can load a store stock level file onto the portal and the portal then creates a set of tickets for each store. Each set is unique to for each store based upon the stock level information loaded into the portal. These tickets are produced using a digital press so print volumes are matched to each individual stores requirement, resulting in zero wastage.

The Result

This has led to a 40% reduction in print volumes resulting in a huge cost saving for the business. In addition, the business is now in a much stronger position to react quickly to pricing needs ensuring their products are priced to the very latest market conditions.